Oceania

The shortest plate in the directory, and the one where the houses are still close enough to their own beginnings to sound nervous.

The seasons are inverted and the houses know it. I went to Sydney in October and to Melbourne in September, which is to say spring twice, and both gardens were doing the work the interiors could not. If you are coming from the north, do not book what you think of as summer.

These are young houses by the standards of the rest of this directory, and they are candid about it in a way older collections are not — the labels tell you what a room cost, who was owed for it, and whose land it stood on. I found that bracing rather than grim.

Two of the four I have not reached: Vaucluse House, which I walked past on the wrong afternoon, and Alberton in Auckland, which I have only corresponded with. I am not going to write about either as though I had been. They stay on the list until they don't.